pressing our vanities (seeking coauthors)

Music: The Auteurs: After Murder Park (1996)

About every other week or so I get an email invitation to publish with an online, "open access" journal. "Dear Dr. Gunn," reads the come-on, "This is a Call for Papers to invite you to submit original articles to . . . Bogus Vanity Quarterly." Random Capitalization is reason Enough to Doubt the legitimacy of such an Outfit. Dubbed by Jeffrey Beall as "predatory publishing," these pretend-not-pretend journals charge anywhere from $400 to $1000 to publish your article (you can even assist them by suggesting whom to review your essay). After getting two of these "invitations" in as many days, I joked on Facebook I cannot wait to send off my essay, "NSFW: Anxiety and Repetition Compulsion in Response to Gilbert Gottfried's Dramatic Interpretation of Fifty Shades of Grey"---or something ridiculous like that. I forget the exact title that I made-up.

Well, lo, a friend who wishes to remain anonymous took it upon himself to start an honest to goodness essay of complete nin-com-poopity. I have added my own taste of hogwash, and now, we present it to you for your co-authorial assistance.

Can you add anything to this prose to get it to the five or seven page mark? Help us. I know you can. Write a paragraph or three in the comments. Make it insane, but then somehow plausible. If your addition is ridiculous enough, we'll add you as a co-author, and then send this off to one of these vanity presses. Also, feel free to rewrite anything to make it more ridiculously plausible. Frankly, the more the merrier: nothing could be more delightful than twenty co-authors! Take that, social scientists!

If accepted for publication, we'll figure out how to pay for it later. A grant? Yes, we need a grant for this. I doubt the National Endowment for the Humanities will go for it, but . . . somewhere and somehow this tomfoolery will be made possible. Here goes:

NSFW: Experiencing Immanentism or Transcendence Upon Hearing Gilbert Gottfried's Rendition of Fifty Shades of Grey in the Postmodern Workplace

Frank Baummett, Sephas Brustkrebs Streut, [insert your pseudonym here]

Immanence has been theorized as a hegemonic totality eliding the possibility of structural transcendence. Not so clear in these efforts to relocate the ideological in the fundamental is the notion of abrogation. Moments of subcultural refusal alternate with moments of the complete abandonment of subject positions contrary to the hermeneutical arc of Dionysian Scapegoating (DS), when this occurs (presumably DS only afflicted lesser developed countries, however, the epidemic of bullying, especially as is discernable in U.S. preschool settings, has belied what was once an obvious truth with rampant exceptionalism). Leftist intellectuals have been as much at fault as any in their failure to capture the subaltern nature of this interrogation, to elide the penultimate mirror stage which must inevitably, if ineluctably, give rise to this refusal ("accept the cut!" intones the Lawgiving Paternalist). Nor can Jung help us out here, as the mandala is, under the discursive formation of this problematic, only a fictive reality. How, then, to recapture that moment of utter intransigence that is necessary for real interventionist politics? Whither now, within?

We argue that moments illustrating this possibility may be found in what seem like the most unlikely texts, and one is the neofeminist, indeed some have argued Fourth Wave work, Fifty Shades of Grey (hereafter Fifty Shades). By turning in upon itself in a voice of subrogation, difference gives way to differance, and the perceptive reader will note the deliberate lack of diacritical marks in our formulation of the contrast. Gilbert Gottfried’s commentary upon this text illuminates exactly the sort of rhetorical turn toward which we genuflect, away from the all-too-easy modernism of DS. And what better context to mark this turn than the postmodern workplace?

Sliding under the surface of postcapitalism, this workplace is both virtual and sententious. Aside from its pretense to high-mindedness and the metaphysics of presence, it is primarily identified by three material attributes: (1) a ubiquity of workers using earbuds; (2) a surfeit of cubed workspaces, often separated by push-pin dividers or mauve-colored walls; and (3) a predominance of communicative or emotional laboring, as opposed to manual laboring or "real work." In this context, how can a sado-masochistic "novel" like Fifty Shades be read in different nodes of the rhizomatic structure of this workplace? That is what our work attempts to get at.

While mostly self-reportative in skein, the narratives displayed here speak most clearly in their erasure under a sign of abstinence. Hangings of the virtual abound in rituals of self-denial and con-(s)traint. The panopticon of the workplace enfolds in upon its ulterior plane of emergence, truncating that internal eye which, like Helmglot’s apocryphal porpoise, seeks only to rise and rise again. These narratives which are yet not narratives but archives, reference their own inversion as specious artifacts, even if true. How can that which is Gottfried’s work and yet not Gottfried’s work be entrained with the refusal of the phallus? In asking that, we likewise refuse the contexts and restraints of any discipline of the academy, but instead propose a theatre of ritual in which the proscenium can be nothing less than a realization of the sexual subjectivity of the authors, if not the forceful penetration of the readerly reader or lookerly spectator (the eyes are not windows to the soul, but britches of the soul and necessarily subject to an intellectual spanking, or exploratory but possibly metaphorical thumb). Given this presumption, we turn in our widening gyre to the only theoretical stance from which one can begin: Gilles Deleuze's.

Deleuzian Worlding: From Be-Bop to Shock Jock

[We need help making up stuff for this section; someone with enough background in Deleuze to know how to make fun of Deleuzians. Three paragraphs or so.]

Arousing Self-Reporters: Workplace Filthy and the Liberation of the Dongle

One person's transcendence is another person's immanence, which can depend on anything from their perceived locus of control to conceptual--or even actual--constipation. Ascending up the metaphorical spiral staircase we find up there a paradoxical attic-catacomb of cubicles, each arranged like so many teeth cavities in the neoliberal mouths of the postcapitalist multitude; in each socket we find a festering employee whiling away the hours by listening to the radio or perhaps even an audiobook (a recording of an actor reading a novel or nonfiction book of some sort, often abridged but sometimes the whole thing). Someone in need of narcotization because of the pain of redundancy and the repetition compulsion of nothingness. E.L. James's racy, best-selling novel of sado-masochistic frenzy, Fifty Shades, may be the novel an employee is listening to for this effect, particularly if he or she is not listening to the radio and instead an audio book. Audio books are not free, like the radio, however they are now relatively inexpensive compared to Internet pornography, which is expensive and which, in many parts of the world. employers do not allow employees to enjoy workplace (one might respond to Foucault: "To Hell with the Greeks; we are a lot more Victorian than we think."). So, chances are that most workers working with earbuds in their ears are listening to Fifty Shades because to date James' book has sold 10 million copies, and at the time of this essay's writing, it was the number one New York Times bestseller.

Readers unfamiliar with Fifty Shades may wish to skip this paragraph, as our purpose here is to describe the line of plot flighted by the escapist and sexy novel. It concerns [insert ridiculous plot summary here.]

Perhaps more importantly of noteworthy is that Audible.com has produced a stunning audiobook of Fifty Shades narrated by the (in)famous character actor Gilbert Gottfried. Mostly known for his roles in films such as ____________ and ______________, Gottfried has established himself as having one of the most distinctive and expressive voices in the industry. In a timbre that rivals the baritone of _________, Gottfried can coax tears and---apparently---much more than that from the body of the ears lubricated by his golden pipes. It was fitting and certainly proper, then, that Audible hired Gottfried to render his interpretation of James's obviously sensuous prose. His voice is roundly recognized as the objective, standard bearer of dramatic purpose and effectivity.

For our experiment, we asked five people who self-identified themselves as listeners to Gottfried's rendition of Fifty Shades to provide self-reports of their experiences. While these reports were at variance, a content analysis of key terms revealed three dimensions common to their listening experiences, which we in turn thematize as: (1) enjoyable revulsion; (2) dexterity envy; and (3) vicarious ecstasy.

Here are some reactions organized around each theme.

ENJOYABLE REVULSION

[Insert stuff here]

DEXTERITY ENVY

[Insert stuff here]

VICARIOUS ECSTASY

[Insert stuff here]

Concluding Remarks: Immanitism FTW! Of the Redemptive Value of Workplace Ecstasy/Revulsion

[Make-up conclusion]

_________________________________

Ok, that's all we have so far. I had to stop writing this because I'm on an airplane and kept cracking up laughing. The lady trying to sleep on my left does not find whatever I'm laughing at funny. Hopefully you will, and won't mind contributing to this beautiful monstrosity. Hot mess labors. Yes.